Eh, you are stretching the definition of an init system, come on now. 
The xz fiasco was a social failure, the maintainer got pressured into allowing a malicious maintainer. Nothing to do with systemd.
As for the network interface problem, I agree this shouldn’t have happened. They really should look into it because it’s inexcusable.
Not my goal to change your mind, I wanted to show another perspective so the discussion is not one-sided. You prioritize one thing, I – another. 
Fair, I don’t disagree per se. It’s just that my experience tells me that declarative instructions > code itself. It’s the future of software (unless AI eats everything in the meantime) and that’s why I am standing behind systemd and other declarative tools.
Another thing I can give you as an example is Makefile-s. You don’t tell it how to do its stuff. You describe tasks, sources and destinations and their relations, then you tell it “make me X or Y” and it figures out how to do it. That’s how software should be and I am sad this is still not the current state of affairs.
I wrote a thousand clever scripts in my 22 years of career and most found a way to break subtly. I am honestly sick of shell scripting and started migrating some of them to Golang. It too has footguns but compared to bash / zsh scripts it’s like comparing a sealed vacuum chamber vs. Swiss cheese.
But that’s a different topic. As I age I really want to see some progress in our area and I am taking it upon myself to do it. Might open-source a collection of scripts aimed at complete system backups at one point, if there’s even a need for such a thing – is one example.
For now. I really do hope the recommendation changes because that’s super defeatist.
